Tuesday, 14 May 2013

Lorde - Royals (Video)

Look. Let’s get this straight. If you’re searching for one of the best pop songs of 2013 so far, then this blog post features it. It’s Royals by New Zealand songstress Lorde.

Of course we’ve already featured the song in a New Waves post a few months back and it's been all over the blogosphere, but now there’s a video. So as it’s one of the best songs of 2013 it would be a crime not to feature the film as well.

Yet it seems that quite a few people don’t know what to make of the video because

1. Lorde doesn’t appear very much in it.

2. There’s no sultry dance routine.

3. Not a lot happens.

There seems to be quite a lot of discussion on the You Tube comments about this. It seems that whilst the song is musically restrained and deals with concepts of living a normal life (“I’ve never seen a diamond in the flesh”) when it comes to a visual treatment some people find this difficult to deal with. We think this is because ultimately pop for many people is an art form of visual fantasy. It's why the likes of Beyonce and Lady Gaga become our idols; because people want to escape their hum drum, very routine, very beige lives and the colour and unreality of pop music offers an outlet to do this.

However thankfully someone seems to ‘get it’ with Royals in the You Tube comments. This is what they say:

"(...) a lot of people think teenagers live in this world like ‘skins’ every weekend or whatever, but truth is, half the time we aren’t doing anything cooler than playing with lighters, or waiting at some shitty stop. That’s why this had to be real. And I’m at that particular train station﻿ every week. Those boys are my friends.”

So watch, enjoy and accept that sometimes not a lot happening is a beautiful thing.

Plus listen out at the end of the video. Is that a preview of an as yet unreleased track perhaps?